First Blog

Invitation for comments…This first blog is about my collection and the process of collecting over the years. I have fought against labels;, especially attaching labels to works sold black artists. I have collected pieces that moved me in my own identity (African American, Jamaican, “world intuitive”), and I have learned art.  I like the idea of Living @Home with ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ and its social and political implications (I don’t display the artist’s tags didactic label for the Doctor Cora Marshall’s “Going, Going, Gone” art works as intended, I guess I am censoring to not potentially offend viewers).

Dwight Baird calls La Mujer con Zapatos Rojos his Mona Lisa.  La Mujer, the “appellation”, in the door greats my family, friends and guests faithfully as they return home.  It has found a permanent, good home.  Good in the sense of treasured, loved, protected, but more so the affirmation of the artist’s gifts, dialogue (hidden motifs discovered years after, artist as “usurper”, etc.) after the “adoption”.   It typifies my acquisition journey, accidental finds of Artist and Art at a street fair in Norwalk, CT.  The skillful artist, a sensitive (white) Canadian painting the Cuban scene with sensibility, honesty, and the pursuit of perfection.  Our occasional dinner conversations over the years, like the majority of my artist encounters globally, enriched me.  The collection is simply, unique and eclectic.  Also, enigmatic, art for its own sake, art as politics, as with Dwight’s dilemma, who has a right to telling stories?  Art as Live.

Budapest

So, you are a collector

By chance a supplier, friend, colleague asked me to introduce her artist at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCP) in Norwalk, CT.  My response, I don’t know; she quipped, just some few words.  Not shy I introduced Ann Tanksley, then unknown to me, sat through her talk, and proceed to avariciously consume half of the unique monotype prints on display.  Her use of shapes, color, movement, and deceptively “childlike” looking elements, yet masterful details, moved me.  Can I buy the plates, too?  After a suspicious, almost contempt-full look, Ann replied, why would I do that?    Not sure how I recovered, but after conversations with her, and when Master Printer Anthony (Tony) Kirk brought my night’s bounty and invoice a soft but firm voice exclaimed, so “you are a collector!”.

Though untrained in Art History, and not having stayed at a Holiday Inn recently, for me Ann Tanksley’s work is a bridge (both generational and stylistic) between the Harlem Renaissance and the current generation of African American Art.  I have placed her with her contemporary Al Loving and followed by TAFA, Ghanaian artist, in his own words the “divine drummer trying to materialize the transient, the spiritual, to search the soul of our hopes, fears and visions”.  A drummer, keeper of the “collective consciousness” and perhaps pain of the relative monetary, if not intrinsic, value of his works versus his broader peers.

Paris

Though untrained in Art History, and not having stayed at a Holiday Inn recently, for me Ann Tanksley’s work is a bridge (both generational and stylistic) between the Harlem Renaissance and the current generation of African American Art.  I have placed her with her contemporary Al Loving and followed by TAFA, Ghanaian artist, in his own words the “divine drummer trying to materialize the transient, the spiritual, to search the soul of our hopes, fears and visions”.  A drummer, keeper of the “collective consciousness” and perhaps pain of the relative monetary, if not intrinsic, value of his works versus his broader peers. Oh, it never occurred to me of another bias of my collecting, vibrant yet understated, harmonious, structured color, until a realtor while checking number of stitches on our beloved Egyptian rug looked up around the room and exclaimed, “you love color”!

“Generations”, African American Masters

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